Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1: Extreme Makeover

The biggest news in Word 12 is the new ribbon interface, which organizes many of Word's features in a sensible way for the first time ever. The features still work the same way as they did in previous versions, at least in this beta version, so Word's idiosyncrasies haven't been eliminated altogether.

Integration with SharePoint or other back-end services make it easy for corporate users to insert standard graphic and text elements that are stored on a server, and these can be updated in a document when they change on the server.

A new Document Properties panel organizes metadata such as title, author, and comments in an XML-based InfoPath document stored within the Word document. Corporate document-management systems can access the metadata by reading the InfoPath file.

The new Word makes extracting metadata just as easy as adding it. A Document Inspector dialog lets you clear all comments, metadata, tracked revisions, and other information that you don't want to show the worldbut there's still no easy way to prevent such metadata from getting into the file in the first place. A "Finalize Document" panel lets you prevent any further revisions to a document after you've finished with it. PDF export is also finally here--years after everyone else added it.

The ribbon interface is a refreshing change from the old menus. For most of the work you do in Word, you'll use the Write ribbon, which includes find/replace, font and paragraph options, a Quick Text Formatting panel that displays frequently used styles graphically, and proofing tools. The Page Layout ribbon starts with a Theme Gallery for choosing among prebuilt font and color palettes, plus page and section breaks, hyphenation (no more trips to Tools | Language to hyphenate your file), and "background" features such as watermarks and border designs. Unfortunately, there's no change (yet) to the confusing underlying labyrinth of separate settings for margins, footnotes, and other options.

Other icons lead to a collection of document building-blocks called Quick Parts, which can include graphics, headers, tables, text snippets, and other items that you want to reuse or that are fed automatically into the menu via SharePoint. A Live Preview featureMicrosoft calls it "new," though WordPerfect has had it since 1999lets you see font and other format changes as you select them in a menu without actually applying them to the document. When you right-click on text, graphics, or tables in a document itself, the pop-up menu includes all the choices that you're familiar with, but you also get a new toolbar with formatting options such as fonts and graphic layouts.

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Richard V. Dragan, a contributing editor of PC Magazine, has written over 250 articles and reviews for the magazine and other Ziff Davis publications since 1992. From 1994 to 1998 he authored a programming column for Computer Shopper. He has taught C++ and Windows programming at Columbia University since 1990, and Java since 1997.
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